[svlug] A strange thing...

[Ray Olszewski]

At 08:53 AM 10/9/98 -0700, Ben Spade wrote (replying to a question by
Michael K. Vance):
[deleted]
>> My only thought would be that I would have immediately recognized this
>> behaviour if the user was 'cron' instead of 'nobody'. Is there some history
>> behind using nobody instead of a name like 'cron' (ie, like 'mail' or 'bin')?
>Cron jobs normally run as the user that submitted them. In the case of
updatedb,
>it makes sense to do the find as user nobody (who presumably has less
priveleges
>to read files than any other user), so that the locate command won't show
>files that you can not read.
[deleted]

It may or may not "make sense" to do it this way, but it is hardly a
standard. In a default Slackware (3.4 and older, at least) installation, the
updatedb job runs from root's crontab file. I'm not suggesting Slackware's
approach is better or worse, just that it is the default a naive,
inattentive, or indifferent user will end up with (and that, in the event
that started this thread, would likely have looked even scarier than an
unfamiliar "nobody" process). 

As is increasingly true with Linux, this is another case of needing to know
the specifics of the distribution you are using.

------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski                                        -- Han Solo
762 Garland Drive
Palo Alto, CA  94303-3603
650.321.3561 voice                               ray at comarre.com
650.322.1209 fax                 http://www.comarre.com/ray.html
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